Chris Lewa, the director of The Arakan Project, a research and advocacy group that monitors Rakhine State, told IRIN the number of Rohingyas that have fled western Myanmar since 2012 has now topped 100,000.

It's unfortunate when an organization tasked with providing help to the needy must ask for help itself. It's even more unfortunate when the help it seeks is rooted in deliberate and systematic suppression.

With counseling and psychosocial support, young lives devastated by war and childhoods violently taken away can be reclaimed. We see it happen when they begin to smile again, laugh again, and play again.

One of Sunday morning's headlines in the NY Times was "Ebola's Cultural Casualty: Hugs in Hands-on Liberia." As a parent and a child advocate I cannot imagine the position so many parents have been put in due to this deadly outbreak.

Various agencies designed to deal with such emergencies were already being stretched before Ebola struck. Equally frustrating is the fact that this crisis graphically demonstrates how the lack of reliable communication today is a matter of life and death, but communication infrastructure lags behind human need.

The health care systems in the countries most affected by the virus -- Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea -- have collapsed. Even before the Ebola outbreak, these countries had very low doctor-to-patient ratios; Liberia had one doctor for every 100,000 people prior to the outbreak.

The aid response in the western Burmese state has been tricky since two bouts of communal violence between Rakhine Buddhists and the minority Rohingya Muslims in June and October 2012 resulted in more than 140,000 people -- mostly Rohingyas -- being forced to flee to camps.

A year ago, James Gatluak, 38, was working with farmers across all nine counties in Unity State to increase food production. Today, he is stuck in a displacement camp in Juba, his state overrun by violence and its people sliding closer to famine.